Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

PENGUIN PRESS

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Copyright 2019 by Ocean Vuong

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Portions of this book have previously appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker, Guernica, and at Buzzfeed.com.

Excerpt from Many Men (Wish Death), words and music by Curtis Jackson, Luis Resto, Keni St. Lewis, Frederick Perren, and Darrell Branch. Copyright 2003 by Kobalt Music Copyrights SARL, Resto World Music, UniversalSongs of PolyGram International, Inc., Bull Pen Music, Inc., UniversalPolyGram International Publishing, Inc., Perren-Vibes Music, Inc., Figga Six Music and Unknown Publisher. All rights for Kobalt Music Copyrights SARL and Resto World Music administered worldwide by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing. All rights for Bull Pen Music, Inc., administered by UniversalSongs of PolyGram International, Inc. All rights for Perren-Vibes Music, Inc., administered by UniversalPolyGram International Publishing, Inc. All rights for Figga Six Music administered by Downtown DMP Songs. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC and Kobalt Music Services America Inc. (KMSA) obo Resto World Music [ASCAP] Kobalt Music Services Ltd (KMS) obo Kobalt Music Copyrights SARL.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Vuong, Ocean, 1988 author.

Title: On earth were briefly gorgeous : a novel / Ocean Vuong.

Other titles: On earth we are briefly gorgeous

Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046290 (print) | LCCN 2018050239 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525562030 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525562023 (hardcover)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Coming of Age.

Classification: LCC PS3622.U96 (ebook) | LCC PS3622.U96 O52 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046290

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Darren Haggar

Cover photograph by Sam Contis

Author photograph by Tom Hines

Illustration by Daniel Lagin

Version_1

For my mother

But let me see ifusing these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone

I can build you a center.

Qiu Miaojin

I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

Joan Didion

Let me begin again.

Dear Ma,

I am writing to reach youeven if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. I dont understand why they would do that. Cant they see its a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that.

I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook youbut that the taxidermy embodied a death that wont finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasnt trying to make a sentenceI was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

Autumn. Somewhere over Michigan, a colony of monarch butterflies, numbering more than fifteen thousand, are beginning their yearly migration south. In the span of two months, from September to November, they will move, one wing beat at a time, from southern Canada and the United States to portions of central Mexico, where they will spend the winter.

They perch among us, on windowsills and chain-link fences, clotheslines still blurred from the just-hung weight of clothes, the hood of a faded-blue Chevy, their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight.

It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, Boom! You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didnt know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leavesbut merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

That time, in third grade, with the help of Mrs. Callahan, my ESL teacher, I read the first book that I loved, a childrens book called Thunder Cake, by Patricia Polacco. In the story, when a girl and her grandmother spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.

The first time you hit me, I must have been four. A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze of touch.

The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered. After the stutters and false starts, the sentences warped or locked in your throat, after the embarrassment of failure, you slammed the book shut. I dont need to read, you said, your expression crunched, and pushed away from the table. I can seeits gotten me this far, hasnt it?

Then the time with the remote control. A bruised welt on my forearm I would lie about to my teachers. I fell playing tag.

The time, at forty-six, when you had a sudden desire to color. Lets go to Walmart, you said one morning. I need coloring books. For months, you filled the space between your arms with all the shades you couldnt pronounce.